Books, arts and culture

A tribute to Nadine Gordimer

Guerrilla of the imagination

NADINE GORDIMER, the first South African and only the seventh woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on July 14th at the age of 90. Seamus Heaney, a fellow Nobel laureate, called her one of the great “guerrillas of the imagination”. In over two dozen works of fiction, she frequently addressed the complex and often tormented political situation of her native land. Her first book, a collection of short stories called "Face to Face", was published in 1949, just a year after the South African government instituted the system of apartheid. She won her Nobel Prize in 1991, the year that system was finally brought to an end.

Along with writers such as Alan Paton and J.M. Coetzee, hers was one of the voices that brought an awareness of the injustices of South African politics to the wider world—and her work suffered because of it. "A World of Strangers" (1958) was banned for 12 years in her native country; "The Late Bourgeois World" (1966) was banned for 10 years. "Burger’s Daughter" (1979) was also banned, but only briefly, for by that point Ms Gordimer was an author with a worldwide reputation. But it was not just under apartheid that her work was threatened: in 2001, a decade after the end of apartheid, her 1981 novel, "July’s People"—set in a future, apocalyptic South Africa where racial tension has erupted into full-blown civil war—was recommended for removal from the school curriculum in Gauteng, South Africa’s wealthiest province. The criticism leveled at the book was that the author did not distance herself strongly enough from the racism explored in the novel. ("Hamlet" was also recommended for removal because it was “not optimistic or uplifting”.) In the end, however, the ban was not upheld.

And yet in many respects Ms Gordimer—who as a girl longed to be a ballet dancer, a dream destroyed because her overbearing mother believed her daughter’s health would suffer—never saw herself as a political writer. Her father was a Jewish watchmaker who had come to South Africa from Lithuania as a boy; her parents’ marriage was unhappy and she was largely self-schooled, a girl who found herself in books. “I would have been a writer anyway,” she told theParis Reviewin 1983. “I was writing before politics impinged itself upon my consciousness. In my writing, politics comes through in a didactic fashion very rarely…The real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa.”

The strength of her fiction lay in the way a social and political landscape was expressed through such a wide variety of characters: characters both white and black, characters from very different economic circumstances. The breadth of her imagination, and her willingness to create characters from all walks of life, brought criticism from those who would wish a writer of her stature to follow a cleanly political agenda. She answered those critics in her Nobel lecture. “The writer sometimes must risk both the state’s indictment of treason, and the liberation forces’ complaint of lack of blind commitment,” she said. “As a human being, no writer can stoop to the lie of Manichean ‘balance’.”

In her last book, "No Time Like the Present" (2012), her characters struggle with the “new” South Africa, with rising crime and an inadequate education system: in 2006 Ms Gordimer herself became the victim of an attack, when thieves broke into her Johannesburg house. In her later years she lent her voice to the HIV/AIDS movement, campaigning for treatment for sufferers; and she criticised the ANC under its current leader, Jacob Zuma, expressing her opposition to a proposed law that would limit the publication of information deemed “sensitive” by the government. “The reintroduction of censorship is unthinkable when you think how people suffered to get rid of censorship in all its forms,” she said last month.

But finally, as she saw it, a writer’s task was both simple and infinitely complex: “What a writer does is try to make sense of life,” she said. That was something she always did.

Readers' comments

Nice piece. So nice. Thank you, E.W. of Prospero of TE.
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I quote the following:
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"The strength of her fiction lay in the way a social and political landscape was expressed through such a wide variety of characters: characters both white and black, characters from very different economic circumstances. The breadth of her imagination, and her willingness to create characters from all walks of life, brought criticism from those who would wish a writer of her stature to follow a cleanly political agenda. She answered those critics in her Nobel lecture. “The writer sometimes must risk both the state’s indictment of treason, and the liberation forces’ complaint of lack of blind commitment,” she said. “As a human being, no writer can stoop to the lie of Manichean ‘balance’".
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Reminds me very much of another Nobel Laureate in Literature - Mo Yan who expressed a likeness of mind in his acceptance lecture.
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To both these writers, the function of literature is totally missed by philistines bloated with political agendas.